Pakistani refugees complain of army and Taliban

Peshawar: The Taliban beheaded their relatives and terrorised their villages. Now army airstrikes are killing the innocent, say refugees who fled fighting set off by a Pakistani military offensive against the extremists.

The army says it is winning the war in the Bajur tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan, one of its most intense operations against Al Qaida and its Taliban allies since 2001. A spokesman even predicts military victory in a month.

Dozens of refugees in tent camps on both sides of the border gave a rare glimpse of the human costs of the fighting in Bajur, a highly dangerous region where foreigners are largely restricted from visiting and Pakistani journalists have limited movement.

"I feel like a walking dead body," Parmeen Bibi said as she carried her wailing three-year-old granddaughter in a camp in Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan's troubled northwest.

"I don't want to go back to where my brothers were slaughtered," she said, referring to four brothers she says were beheaded by the Taliban for supporting the government. "To hell with those people, to hell with those lands." Nearly 200,000 people have fled the fighting in Bajur, and many have sought refuge in the camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For the most part, the refugees said they witnessed only airstrikes and heard artillery fire in the distance. The army also has some 6,000 to 8,000 soldiers and paramilitary troops on the ground.

Efforts

Pakistan says it is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in Bajur, which is believed to be a possible hiding place for Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders.

However, many refugees complained of high numbers of civilians killed in army airstrikes. Gulzada Khan said he and others had braved dangers to collect the bodies of children and women killed in the air attacks. "Whenever we went to collect the remains, the aircraft came again to the area and started bombing it," he said.

In the Pakistani camps, families live in tents, with straw mats to cover the muddy floor. Heat and flies are constant companions, though conditions have improved since August because of work by the United Nations and other agencies. In Afghanistan, some refugees are living in the open air.

"We have suffered a lot in this fighting," said Abdul Nadeem, a 28-year-old sheltering on the Afghan side. "We have just come here by ourselves and with our children, and we have left behind everything we have."